HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM - BELATEDLY

Ninety one years ago yesterday, August 27th 1916, Dulcie Kate Bovet came into this world - a fourth daughter for Walter John Bovet, a career railroad conductor and Eva Bovet, whom my mother would only know for the first seven years of her life as she died in her late 30's.

I didn't send mum a card and there's a pretty good chance she won't read the greeting on this blog - as she went to heaven almost twenty years ago, which seemed a little premature to me at the time, and was long before Al Gore invented the internet.

My grandfather had one more daughter, making it five in all and he raised them when he was widowed - an incredible achievement in an era long before daycare.

I had an outstanding mother and I sometimes think that part of it was due to the fact that she had not really had a mother herself as she grew up. So she became all the things to us that she had missed out on herself.

There were five of us siblings in our home too and my mother never worked outside the house while we were kids. There was never a single day from infancy to the time I graduated high school when I got home in the afternoon and she wasn't there.

I guess we could have had a lot more stuff if my mother had pursued her career as a book-keeper. We may have had a fancier house with luxuries like an inside toilet and a bathroom, but we didn't. We might have owned a family car, but I was sixteen before one of those was parked outside the door. We didn't get a TV until I was six and we never had a phone while I lived at home.

I guess we were dirt poor.

But we weren't really because we had a mom.

Happy birthday mum!